Richard Freadman

THIS CRAZY THING A LIFE

Serge Liberman

This Crazy Thing a Life: Australian Jewish Autobiography, by Richard Freadman. University of Western Australia Press, 2007, 301p., $39.95.

With this book, This Crazy Thing a Life, Professor Richard Freadman of LaTrobe University has produced a landmark study of Australian Jewish writing. He is the first scholar in Australia who has written a comprehensive work in the field – or at least in one aspect of it, that of Australian Jewish autobiography - which is a wide-ranging, profound and multi-faceted presentation and discussion based on his reading of some 300 published book-length memoirs and 400 shorter pieces published in anthologies, a number that impresses with the sheer industriousness of Jewish autobiographers, the bulk of these writings having come into the light only in the past ten fifteen years.

The book is divided into three parts.

The first of these is an extensive discussion of Australian autobiographical writing set against the background of Australian Jewish history, population growth and the profound demographic, cultural, ideological, religious, organisational and political changes that have taken place here from the pre-war predominantly Anglo-Saxon Jewish life to its profound transformation as an immediate consequence of the post-war influx of Eastern and Central European Jews as refugees. These migrations, attended by the experiences of uprootedness, statelessness, refugee status and finally of citizenship, as reflected in the works of many of the writers studied, raise the issue of what it means to live in the diaspora – a question rendered particularly acute upon the establishment of the Jewish State.

The short and long-term consequences of migration raise other debatable concerns: “What is Jewishness?” (one corollary of which is “What is Australian Jewish autobiography?”) and where is the dividing line between Australian Jews and Jewish Australians, these appearing to be in considerable part defined by where these antipodean Jews appear to locate themselves along a spectrum from being resolutely Jewish first and foremost at the one end, grading through accommodation, integration, acculturation, marginalisation and indifference to their Jewishness, culminating in assimilation at the other.

At another level, Professor Freadman deals with the pitfalls of autobiographical writing raised by contemporary critics of a so-called postmodernist stance who question the capacity of memory and language to accurately narrate the past, thereby also questioning the ability to do so with absolute truth and completeness, an argument which, when taken to the extreme, gives balm to Holocaust deniers. In academic institutions, these are particularly complex literary and philosophical themes, but Professor Freadman, while being no less scholarly, writes with a lighter hand. He is lucid, articulate and marvellously accessible as he takes up arms against these views, approaching the texts with what he calls a humanist and empirical approach, writing more as a commentator, an elucidator, a guide and a companion to help his readers to see more deeply into the works he discusses.

True as this is of the whole book, it is more evident still in its second part, in which he teases out a generous succession of diverse crystalline elements, insights and associations that a lay reader might so easily miss, as in the works of Jacob Rosenberg, Arnold Zable, The Brett sisters, Doris and Lily, Mark Baker, David Martin, Andrew Riemer and Susan Varga, these separate essays on each being complemented by another on the Makor Library’s “Tell your Story” project, recounting its work in facilitating the writing of autobiography in the community.

The last part of the book is an anthology of extracts from the works of some sixty-six writers, a selection of memoirs of the “Old World” and of survival through the Holocaust, followed by accounts of statelessness, migration, and settlement in Australia, while touching upon relations between the generations, the authors’ sense of belonging or of wariness as Jews, their degree of Jewish observance, and other issues of gender and careers.

This Crazy Thing a Life is a book that is not just of this time or for this time. Given its scope and its depth, it is a model for both further studies on Australian Jewish writing and a guide and encouragement to anyone who has a story to tell - not only of the Holocaust and migration, which inform the greater part of this volume, but of the phases that come after – such as growing up in Australia, of “making it” or “not making it” here, and of other gains, aspirations, achievements, evolving identities and ambivalences, perplexities and complexities encountered in Australia. It is as much a book for one’s home, one’s bedside table, all Jewish institutions, all institutions engaged in the study of genocide and all other appropriate university faculties.… (altro)